1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to the interactions between mobile device and a server within a network, and more specifically to the ability to provide interactive media to a user of a mobile device.
2. Related Art
Electronic devices, such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDA's), often contain small screens with very limited viewing area. They are constrained in terms of how much information can be displayed, and in terms of user interaction capabilities. The keyboards on cell phones, for example, are not conducive for user data entry, and only brief user inputs can be solicited from a user without annoying the user. However, mobile phones are also not convenient for viewing a large amount of text or browsing through busy web pages provided by most Internet web sites.
Many people would like to view cartoons on their mobile devices. However, the experience is limited and primitive as all they can currently do is view one panel of a cartoon at a time, after accessing a web site that provides cartoons. These cartoons are just scanned copies or some graphic provided by a creator, which are often true copies of those provided for published/printed media, such as magazines and newspapers. These cartoon providers try to replicate the cartoon viewing experience from a news paper. They do not make use of the other features/capabilities of the mobile device (or an PC computer either) that could be leveraged to provide a much more satisfactory experience and quality. These online cartoon providers provide a version (a graphic version, such as using a graphic image or a PDF of a graphic image) of modern gag cartoons, found in magazines and newspapers, that generally consist of a single drawing with a caption immediately beneath or (less often) a speech balloon.
Editorial cartoons are often not provided online to a mobile device. They are a type of gag cartoon found almost exclusively in news publications. Although they also employ humor, they are more serious in tone, commonly using irony or satire. The art usually acts as a visual metaphor to illustrate a point of view on current social and/or political topics. Editorial cartoons often include speech balloons and, sometimes, multiple panels.
Cartoons that have multiple panels are typically not available online, and especially on mobile devices. Comic strips, also known as “strip cartoons” in the United Kingdom, are found daily in newspapers worldwide, and are usually a short series of cartoon illustrations in sequence. In the United States they are not as commonly called “cartoons” themselves, but rather “comics” or “funnies”. Nonetheless, the creators of comic strips—as well as comic books and graphic novels—are referred to as “cartoonists”. Although humor is the most prevalent subject matter, adventure and drama are also represented in this medium. The availability of such comic strip cartoons are often restricted to printed media such as news papers. Some Internet webpages provide access to a version of these—however they are not appropriate for mobile devices, and they do not incorporate features that can make these comic strip cartoons more flexible and better in user experience. For example, they lack time ordered delivery of subject matter information or dialogs associated with the multiple characters.
Some recent motion pictures are based on animated cartoons. These are expensive projects costing multiple millions of dollars and several hundred employees to make them and a TV or DVD player to view them. They can also be viewed as typical movies using streaming media on computers, over the Internet.
An animated image, such as that of an animated cartoon horse, for example a cartoon horse drawn by rotoscoping from Edweard Muybridge's 19th century photos, also are popular. According to Wikipedia, because of the stylistic similarities between comic strips and early animated movies, “cartoon” came to refer to animation, and this is the sense in which “cartoon” is most commonly used today. These are usually shown on television or in cinemas and are created by showing illustrated images in rapid succession to give the impression of movement. (In this meaning, the word cartoon is sometimes shortened to toon, which was popularized by the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit). Although the term can be applied to any animated presentation, it is most often used in reference to programs for children, featuring anthropomorphized animals, superheroes, the adventures of child protagonists, and other related genres. Animated material which does not fit the traditional conventions of mainstream Western animation, such as Japanese anime are often confused with the definition of cartoons
The whole process of creating cartoons is quite difficult, with drawling tools used to draw them on computers. Then they have to be emailed or somehow sent to publishers of magazines and newspapers. For people unaffiliated with newspapers and magazines, there are limited avenues for sharing it with others. A few enterprising individuals setup special customized websites to exhibit their cartoons, but they have to be tech-savvy and be able to work with and manage their web sites. However, kids and non-technical individuals cannot setup and manage websites although they would be interested in creating cartoons and sharing them with friends and family.
Accessing cartoons available on typical Internet based websites from mobile devices is quite often unsatisfactory and not useful due to several factors, not least of which is the multi-media and graphics rich format in which most Internet websites are designed and made available and the verbosity of text to wade through, and the difficulty of typing on small keyboards on a mobile phone. A mobile phone with a small screen is not a good candidate for viewing such complicated and graphics rich (with graphics, flash screens, video components, etc.) content—imagine a webpage being presented to a user that a music component, a whole a page of text (over 3 KB of text) embedded with three large diagrams, and a table of information, all on the same webpage. Such a multi-media webpage is very typical for Internet access, and is obviously unsuitable for a mobile device.
Thus, there is a problem in presenting a mobile user with cartoons when the user is using a mobile phone. Requiring a user to provide text inputs to retrieve or search for a cartoon input is a big problem.
Typically, space on the graphics of a panel of a cartoon is wasted to show balloons of text, as it is typically done in comic strings and political cartoons. Thus, the graphic on a panel looses some of the details as text balloons can occupy a lot of space of the panel, sometimes as much as 50%, typically 30% of the space (often at the top of the panel). Such space is wasted when they have been set aside for text balloons (such as for the textual display of dialogs of the characters).
Mobile devices such as a cell phone are therefore devices for which traditional Internet websites, including websites that provide cartoons, are ill prepared to provide information. However, the same Internet web page would be unmanageable and difficult to browse and navigate on a cell phone with a small LCD screen and small keyboard for user input.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art through comparison of such systems with the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.